Matching elastic contours

An optimal method to match elastic contours is proposed. The method is based on dynamic programming and on some ideas borrowed from stereo matching, where occlusions correspond to contour regions that have no match after the deformation. The matching between two circles of different sizes and centers is shown. One may consider this experiment as the matching between two images of an inflating balloon. The algorithm produces uniform matches along the perimeter despite the large difference in size of the two contours. The matching of the inner and outer walls of the heart left ventricle is also shown. This matching can give diagnostic information for the heart wall. Because of the restricted search space, the DP matching algorithm is very fast, matching two contours of 500 points in a few milliseconds